The Big East Conference is a collegiate
athletic conference
An athletic conference is a collection of sports teams, playing competitively against each other in a sports league. In many cases conferences are subdivided into smaller divisions, with the best teams competing at successively higher levels. Con ...
that competes in
NCAA
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges and ...
Division I in ten men's sports and twelve women's sports. Headquartered in New York City, the eleven full-member schools are primarily located in
Northeast
The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each sepa ...
and
Midwest
The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of the United States. ...
metropolitan areas. The conference was officially recognized as a Division I multi-sport conference on August 1, 2013, and since then conference members have won NCAA national championships in men's basketball, women's cross country, field hockey, men's lacrosse, and men's soccer.
Val Ackerman is the commissioner.
The conference was formed after the "Catholic Seven" members of the
original Big East Conference elected to split from the football-playing schools in order to start a new conference focused on basketball. These schools (
DePaul,
Georgetown,
Marquette,
Providence,